Free Republic

Voting starts Wednesday in the annual Fat Bear Week contest at Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve, with viewers picking their favorite among a dozen brown bears fattened up to survive the winter. The contest, which is in its 10th year, celebrates the resiliency of the 2,200 brown bears that live in the preserve on the Alaska Peninsula, which extends from the state’s southwest corner toward the Aleutian Islands. The animals gorge on the abundant sockeye salmon that return to the Brooks River, sometimes chomping the fish in midair as they try to hurdle a small waterfall and make...

Obesity caused by fast-food diets, a growing scourge of American society, is now even affecting wild bears, researchers in the United States have found.Black bears living near American towns and cities are changing their feeding habits, devoting more and more time to raiding rubbish bins and tips, and in conseqeuence growing overweight from the left-overs of fast-food meals, said the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in New York.High-calorie, high-fat diets have led to record levels of obesity among people and even domestic pets in the US. Now a study organised in Nevada has found that black bears living near urban areas...